Menu

dune

Recently I saw at Youtube someone telling about his view on game programming. His targetted audience was for those who want to create games, but have no clue how to start. He began with something along the line of “I’ve been programming games for 5 years, so I guess I could say I’m experienced“.

That got me thinking. How long have I been programming (for) games?

I’ve been working on Arrakis since I was around 14/15 years old. I’ve finished it when I was 18. Arrakis is written in Basic (using Quick Basic 4.5). I realized in order to get further I had to learn a new programming language. One that did not had the limitations as Basic. Thats when I had decided to learn C. My first attempt was writing a new Dune II clone, this time really using the Dune II graphics.

After a short period of learning C I began playing around with the Half-Life SDK; I’ve been toying around with a bot framework (Botman’s bot) and before I knew it, RealBot was born. RealBot has been developed for around 4 years.

Today, I am 26 years old. I haven’t worked on Dune II – The Maker seriously since 2006. This would mean I would have rougly around 7 to 8 years “experience”. So considering that, I might also say that I have experience in game programming.

When you look at my LinkedIn, you see none of those projects counted as experience. Sure, they are mentioned
under “websites”. But I would prefer to put them in a more suited spot. Perhaps somebody has a suggestion for that.

Although ~ 8 years might sound like a lot. I do think it has to taken with a grain of salt.

First, I did not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Secondly, I did not have any sparring partners, so quality wise I did not write superb code.

However, there are concepts that I’ve learned; and you only learn those when you write games. Concepts like:

sprite/bitmap management

drawing maps / tile engine

A*

parsing files (from original game)

little AI,

state machines,

double buffering

blending techniques

team colouring (in RTS)

using colorkey’s

transparancy

palette manipulation

And probably a few other things I can’t recall at this moment.

So yeah, perhaps I could say I do have experience in Game programming…